Arduino CLI: An Introduction

It’s been a long time since we first launched our Arduino IDE inspired by the glorious Processing interface, and what started as a Java UI wrapper for build scripts has gone through countless iterations over the past fifteen years.

Some may remember the transition between 1.0 and 1.5, or the application’s icon being replaced, but behind the scenes where many of our users don’t go look, we’ve completely overhauled the way libraries are included, code is cleaned, fail-safe measures are implemented, and a sketch is built.

At the same time our more advanced users have been implementing workarounds to use our internal builder command in their workflows for the most diverse reasons.

Projects have spawned to create Arduino-based makefiles, build scripts, code linters ,and snippets to program their boards using their favorite code editors, and we’ve seen people use Eclipse, Sublime Text, VS Code, Vi(m), Emacs, or even XCode to create Arduino projects.

We keep our eyes peeled when it comes to how our community uses our tools and try as much as possible to learn from it, and this inspired us to get back to the drawing board.

The software that makes up the Arduino platform has grown incrementally over time — new features were added and sometimes the need to quickly factor in those changes did not make it easy to foresee how things would develop years ahead. This led to a situation in which multiple chunks of code and functionalities were spread across different Arduino software products (the Java IDE, the Create Agent, the Web Editor servers, upload/discovery tools, etc.), some of them overlapping or redundant.

The needs of our community, as well as our own, prompted us to radically rethink our approach and embark on a major refactoring operation with the goal to obtain a single reference implementation: the Arduino Command Line Interface.

As we move forward, all our legacy products are being reworked to use the Arduino CLI as the foundation to build upon.

We believe this effort will provide our users and ourselves with more advanced, flexible tools that we can all benefit from.

[ShaunakDe]

So glad to have a functional CLI. I love working in the terminal and this will help boost productivity by letting me use the tools I know and love (tmux, vim)

[Dygear]

Oh thank god. This I can add to sublime text to make a build system in that without having to worry about the Arduino IDE interface getting in my way.

[machinaexphilip]

happy about feedback and/or pull requests.

[amardarwatkar]

Can Ardino be used to produce business goods? What is your opinion on this?
Basic product.